4th Nuba Mountain Languages Conference

The 4th Nuba Mountain Languages Conference will take place on February 5-7, 2023 at the University of Khartoum, Department of Linguistics.

In the very center of the Republic of the Sudan, the province of South-Kordofan is home to several tens of diverse indigenous communities, each of which speaks (alongside with Arabic, the main vehicular of that region) a tongue of their own. South-Kordofan is characterised by a rather extraordinary linguistic diversity : in a tiny region of 80.000 km2 , at least two scores of different tongues are still daily spoken by approximately 1.000.000 to 2.000.000 people, usually collectively designated by the umbrella name Nuba (Nadel 1978 [1947] : 2-4). The diversity of the languages spoken by the Nuba is exceptional : they represent perhaps two thirds of the total number of languages spoken in the whole Sudan in an area which covers fewer than 5 % of the country.